So now Barack Obama is a fussy faggot. At least that's what we heard from the McCain campaign last week (although the campaign's decision to play the race card got all the attention).

Okay, so they didn't use the "F" word, but we all know what they meant. Obama's a priss. A wuss. And we wouldn't want that kind of man (the kind who is less-than-a-man) as the President of the United States.

But what I don't understand is why anyone should think that being a fussy faggot is such a bad thing. Wasn't "Queer Eye" a huge hit? Don't fussy faggots get things done right and done right with style the first time? Would the Iraq invasion have been such a disaster if the Bushies had given the job to Felix Unger ("The Odd Couple") instead of the Keystone Cops? Would our financial system be falling apart if Miss Hathaway (from "The Beverly Hillbillies") were making the rules?

Kidding aside, what I find appalling is that Team Rove (Lite) is still using the old playbook. Sissify the guy and he's toast. It's sickening. And where are the folks in the gay community who could really push back? The Log Cabin Republicans are still dithering over whether to endorse McCain when they should be front and center condemning him for using intimations of faggotry to score points with the bigoted and ignorant among us.

McCain should be ashamed of himself and so should gay Republicans who enable him and his attack dogs by remaining silent.

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Huh? That's a whole other subject! I'm talking about Republican efforts to insinuate that Obama is gay (or that he embodies the stereotypically negative qualities associated with gay men--fussy, weak, etc.)! What do Paris and Brittney have to do with that?

For all of his talk about "straight talk," McCain's latest efforts to smear Obama are anything but straight. They're pathetic! And again I ask, where are the gay Republicans? Why are they silent?

The gay Republicans are silent because they're Republican first and gay second.

I understand the idea that Republicans have painted Obama and pretty much any other Democratic man as feminine/faggy; I mean, I worked for a month documenting the phenomenon.

The Britney/Paris ad is part of that cabal. The narrative is that Obama is like a celebrity, like Britney or Paris. It wasn't just that one ad, the comparison to female celebrities was also in a press release from the McCain campaign, a press conference with a McCain staffer, and even made an appearance in a Q&A with McCain (something along the lines of "like any celebrity, Obama becomes fussy and hysterical when presented with legitimate criticism").

There may have been a racial black man/white woman component to that ad, but it's also working on the new narrative, that Obama is a hysterical, air-headed, self-absorbed celeb, like two female celebrities, because women are hysterical, empty-headed, and self-absorbed.

Do we really think that the drumbeat, both verbal and visual, from the McCain campaign that Obama=Britney/Paris is only about race? Does the racial level even work without the visual cues? And does "fussy like Paris" conjure up fears that he's going to sleep with her?

Were I Obama I would ask: "Is that all you have got when you have lost on the issues?"

I think the better question is why are these character attributes associated with Gay men? Why is "tough, cold and hyper efficient" (Ms Hathaway) associated with Lesbians? I have gotten so annoyed with popular culture generally that I have turned the TV off in disgust. Ordinary strong capable and proud Gay men and women are not "newsy" or extreme enough? We have lost sight of the great capable middle of our own experience in a constant search for some abstraction. I am sure that I am in the minority on this, but I found "Queer Eye" and "Runway" to be both boring and counterproductive to the understanding between people.

That said people should act in a manner that is natural to themselves without fear or presumption of their sexuality being tied to it. It is this overcompensation that leads to the incorrect assumption that: "Because all A's are definitely B all B's must be A."

I would be unconcerned if a president decided he liked to relax hooping rugs, making pottery, clearing brush, reading to his kids or playing the piano like that sissy Truman who dropped the first A Bomb.

And as to presidential qualifications Andrew Jackson liked cockfighting. That hardly made him a great president.

- "I would be unconcerned if a president decided he liked to relax hooping rugs, making pottery, clearing brush, reading to his kids or playing the piano like that sissy Truman who dropped the first A Bomb."

Wait a minute - W. likes to clear brush. I don't want another president who likes to clear brush.